What ant colonies tell us about human-engineered networks, and 4 other stories you may have missed

By Adrienne LaFrance

Digital First Media

Posted:
07/08/2013 05:23:48 AM MDT

Updated:
07/08/2013 05:28:17 AM MDT

A study of ant colonies; hunger in rural Tennessee; female inmates who say they were coerced into getting sterilized — those and other stories you may have missed from the weekend.

What ant colonies tell us about human-engineered networks, and 4 other stories you may have missed

Dino Quinzani/Creative CommonsWired explores the parallels between ant colonies' networks and human-engineered ones. For instance, researchers found that some ants use an algorithm to regulate foraging that looks a lot like the Traffic Control Protocol (TCP) used to regulate data traffic on the Internet. In ant colonies, no individual ant knows what's going on but the entire network constantly adjusts based on brief ant-to-ant encounters."Both ant and human networks use positive feedback: either from acknowledgements that trigger the transmission of ...

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story

New coordinator pushes Buffs to work, play at level he expectsJim Leavitt has discovered this much about his new defense at Colorado: He has some talent with which to work, but his players need to put it in another gear. Full Story